T. H. Huxley , " Darwin's Bulldog " , lecture on wonderful America in 1877 - but " What are you going to do with these things ? "

What Are You Going To Do With All These Things? Published onMarch 16, 2009Author I am on a reading binge of late, soaking up American history from new (to me) perspectives. Here's one I found while reading The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr (1952). It is from Thomas H. Huxley's American AddressesOpens in a new window (1877): ... To an Englishman landing upon your shores for the first time, travelling for hundreds of miles through strings of great and well-ordered cities, seeing your enormous actual, and almost infinite potential, wealth in all commodities, and in the energy and ability to turn wealth to account, there is something sublime in the vista of the future. Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national pride. I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and hte terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things? What is to be the ends to which these are to be the means? [ " You and your descendants have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether state rights will hold out against centralisation, without separation, whether centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pressure of what is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard. " ]